Indie dev

1h Prototype: Octopus, TPS

This one I really enjoyed! The finished prototype may not be the best, but I’m happy with the challenge. I got to make something I haven’t made yet (a shooter) and had a lot of fun doing it.

I wasn’t sure where to start at first, it’s a crazy theme and I had a few different ideas but all of them seemed a little too large scale. At first I was going to have an octopus shoot out of different arms and each leg has a different effect. I probably could have achieved it in an hour if I had worked on it from the start, but I spent around 20m just putting the octopus together:

This didn’t leave me much time to get the game in there so I had to scale down a little and just give him 2 standard ink shooters. Here’s a look at the game (ish) I ended with:

The general idea is you run around this level (was intended to be underwater) and fight off sharks. I didn’t get time to create the sharks so I acted quick and created a variation of the octopus. There were a few other things that I missed:

Enemies attacking

Enemy HP (UI)

HUD (rechargeable ink meter, health)

Animation

The biggest one is animation. I think a little movement on the legs and making the head lean when you move would make this look mountains better. Obviously, if I had have done that I’d have probably ended with just a movement system & no combat. This kind of decision making is why I enjoy these challenges, usually in a game you’d include both features when they are this scale. But plenty of times during development you get features that you can’t quite get done or collide with other features. It’s kind of like that, but I’ve got to decide make good or make game. Hopefully as I keep practicing I’ll find a balance. Either way this one is quite fun to play and it was a cool one to work with.

Until next time….

P.s I’ve finished university now, so development on Finger Ninja will recontinue after the following week 😀